The League of Revolutionary Black Workers for Militants Today

We wanted to share a dope paper written by a member of ¡ella pelea! on the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. As described by the paper, the League

“…emerged in Detroit in the late 1960s, a period of growing dissatisfaction with the mainstream integrationist civil rights organizations and the failures of the Democratic Party to address the subjugation of black people in a comprehensive way. A new movement which came to be known as Black Power or Black Liberation, grew out of these failures and gave birth to a new identity and a number of new mass and revolutionary organizations, one of the most advanced being the Revolutionary Union Movement and the League…

Catalyzed by the Great Rebellion of 1967, an upheaval of Detroit’s black poor against police brutality, poor living conditions, and limited jobs, the League saw the necessity of organizing black workers. Formed by a core of organizers who worked in the auto industry, they were also instrumental in organizing the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), in the Dodge Main auto plant and which pushed for addressing atrocious workplace conditions, speed-up, and the extension of the working day as well as their racist implications. Some DRUM militants were a part of previous civil rights groups but were discontented with the politics and took a more radical political stand that contextualized white supremacy through the framework of capitalist social relations.”

There are many lessons to be learned from the experience of the League and this paper takes an important step towards distilling that history for a new generation of militants today!

They Don’t Know

Who We Be

We are students and community members, both queer and straight, multi-gendered and multi-racial; we are inspired by the Palestinian Intifadas, the transgender militants of Stonewall, Black Power, indocumentalismo, Chicanismo, and Third World and Black Feminism, among others.

We organize on the demands of women, queer folks, people of color and immigrants, documented and undocumented--our own demands--in our fight against the attack on public education at the University of Texas at Austin.